King and Emperor

Chapter Three

Shef eyed his royal guests broodingly as they emerged from the guest hall he had had built for them. The dread of the night was still on him. It had turned the whole world a darker shade. He found himself even walking more lightly, more warily, as if at any moment the earth might split and hurl him down to what he knew lay beneath.

And yet all seemed well enough. There was his friend and partner Alfred, turning on the steps and stretching his arms out encouragingly to the sturdy toddler behind him. Little Edward half-running, half-falling into his father's catch. Behind them both, stepping forward with pleased maternal smile and a second baby slung familiarly on her hip, the face Shef could not forget. His own love, long-lost to him now, Godive, once his childhood sweetheart from the marshes, now known and loved far and wide as the Lady of Wessex. They could not see him for a moment as he stood in the shadow of the strange contrivance he meant to show off that day. He could observe unobserved.

Unobserved by those he watched. Not by his own men, who shifted uneasily and glanced at each other as they saw his silent concentration.

He ought, he knew, to at least fear and resent them. To be making plans for—if not their death, their removal. For making them safe. Many would say, though they did not dare to say it to his face, that it was a king's first duty to think of his own successor. Years ago, in the dark days of the double invasion by Charles the Bald's Franks and Ivar the Boneless's pagans, Shef and Alfred had agreed to share their luck, and their kingdoms, if they should ever hold them again. They had agreed too that each would be the other's successor if either died without an heir, and that any heir of either would inherit from both in the same situation. The deal had not seemed important at the time. Neither had much chance of living to see another winter, let alone another spring. And Godive had slept in Shef's tent, if not in his bed. He had thought, if they lived, it would only be a matter of time till her love returned, and his desire.

He had been wrong. If he died now, his kingdom fell to Alfred. And after him to the laughing toddler now being carried towards him, baby Edward. The sub-kings would ignore the agreement, of course. There was no chance that the Scandinavian kings, Olaf or Guthmund or any of the dozen others, would agree to obey an English Christian. It was doubtful if even the Mercians or Northumbrian English would accept rule by a Wessex Saxon. The One King of the North was truly One King. No-one else would be accepted by the rest.

An unstable situation. Could this be the trigger for the Ragnarök his father wanted him to know of? He ought to take a wife and breed a son as fast as possible. Everyone thought so. The court was alive with jarls' daughters and princesses of the North, paraded in the hope of catching the king's feeble attention. Ragnarök or no, he would not do it. Could not do it.

As he stepped forward out of the shadow to greet his guests, Shef creased his face into a welcoming smile. Even to those he greeted, it looked like a rictus of pain. Alfred controlled himself, managed not to shoot a glance at his wife. He had known for years that his co-king was not the boy-lover many whispered, was instead in love with his own wife. Sometimes he wished it was in him to hand her over, or to share her. But while it might be in him, it was not in her. For some reason, she seemed to hate her friend of childhood more deeply each passing year. Her resentment grew with his success: as she thought, perhaps, of what might have been.

“What have you to show us today?” asked Alfred with false-ringing good cheer.

Shef's face brightened, as it always did when he had some new thing to explain. “It is a horse-wain. But one to carry people.”

“Wains have always carried people.”

“Three miles to market and back. Bump into a pothole, crawl out of it. Going no faster than a walk, or the passengers would be hurled out. Even on the good stone roads we have had built, you and I”—the last three words were mere flattery, as everyone knew—“it would be torment to travel in it if the horses began to run.

“But not with this. See.” Shef patted a stout post that led up from a frame above the axles. “This post holds a metal spring.” He pointed to it.

“Like the steel you use for your crossbows.”

“Yes. Over the spring we fit straps of the stoutest leather. And from the straps we hang—this.” Shef patted the wickerwork body of the coach, setting it swaying gently. “Climb in.”

Gingerly Alfred stepped up, sat on one of the two benches in the coach body, noting the way it bounced and swung like a hammock.

“Lady.” Shef stood back a careful two paces to avoid any brush of hand or clothing, gestured Godive in after her husband. She climbed in, moved little Edward from the place he had seized by his father, and settled herself firmly next to Alfred. Shef climbed in too, picked up the wailing child, and sat him next to himself. He waved to the driver in front of them, who cracked his whip and set off with a dramatic jerk.

As the coach dashed at unheard-of speed down the road behind its four horses, Alfred leapt in his seat with surprise. From behind the coach there came a dismal screech, which turned into a violent noise like pigs being killed. A gap-toothed face rose grinning into view, face purple with the exertion of blowing on a bagpipe.

“My thane Cwicca. If they hear the bagpipe people know to clear the road.”

And indeed the coach, swaying from side to side on its springs, was already racing for the outskirts of Stamford. Alfred realized that the road was lined with cheering churls and their wives, all caught up in the intoxication of speed. Behind them the royal escorts were stretching out their horses into a gallop, whooping like jaybirds with excitement. Godive clutched her baby daughter to her and looked anxiously at Edward, prevented from climbing out by King Shef's iron grip on his breeches.

Above the roar of the road Alfred yelled, “Is this the most useful new thing the Wisdom-House has brought you?”

“No,” Shef shouted back. “There are many. Here is one coming up, I'll show you. Stop, Osmod,” he bellowed to the driver, “stop for Christ's sake, I mean Thor's sake, stop, can't you, what's the matter?”

Another grinning face peered back. “Sorry, lord, the horses get excited, like, with the speed.”

Alfred looked down doubtfully. The court of Stamford was a strange place. Men called Alfred esteadig, “the Gracious,” for his kindness and his good humor. Just the same, his thanes and aldermen addressed him with something like respect. Even churls often spoke to his co-king as if they were both schoolboys engaged in stealing apples: and both Cwicca and Osmod, thanes though they might be called, still had the marks of slave-birth on their faces and bodies. Not long ago their only possible contact with a king would have been facing his doom on an execution-ground. It was true that Cwicca and Osmod were both survivors of the One King's strange journey to the North, and so allowed many liberties. Even so…

The One King had already sprung from the coach, leaving its door swinging open, and was setting off from the road to a group of churls knee-deep in mud not far away. They broke off from what they were doing, knuckled foreheads in respect. And yet they were grinning too.

“See what they're up to? What's the hardest work in clearing a new field? Not cutting the trees down. Any fool can do that with a broad-axe. No, getting the stumps out. They used to cut them off low down and then try and burn them out. Long job, and oak, or ash, or elm, they'll all grow back from almost anything.”

“But what we have here”—Shef seized a long staff standing up from a complex contrivance of iron wheels and pulley-blocks—“is ropes rigged to the stoutest stump in the field. Fit the other ends round a weaker stump. Throw your weight on it”—Shef suited his actions to the words, ratcheted the staff back, threw his weight forward again, and again. Twenty yards away, with cracking noises, a stump began to heave out of the earth. A churl sprang forward, added his weight to the king's. With heave after heave, the stump tore free, to loud cheering from churls and the watching escort.

The king wiped his muddy hands on the legs of his gray breeches, waved to the churls to drag the stump free and attach the ropes to the next victim.

“England is tree country. I am turning it into grain country. This pulley machine was made in the Wisdom-House by priests of Njörth—they are seamen, they know all about pulleys—and some of my catapulteers. They are used to cogwheels. My steelmaster, Udd, is in charge of making the wheels. They have to be small, but strong.”

“And do you let anyone have the machine?”

Shef's turn to grin. “If they left it to me, maybe. But they don't. My fee-master in the House of Wisdom, Father Boniface, he rents them out to those with land to clear. They pay a fee for the machine. But cleared land is free for the clearers to keep. Not for ever. For three lives. Then the land reverts to the crown. I get rich from the rents of the machines. My successors”—Shef nodded at baby Edward. “They get rich when the land comes back to them.”

He pointed across the flat fields of Stamfordshire to the now-familiar shape of a windmill, sails turning briskly in the breeze. “Another new thing over there. Not the windmill, you know about that. What it's attached to. Another way to make new land. Come along and I'll show you.”

The horse-wain slowed dramatically as Osmod the driver turned it off the Great North Road with its stone-and-gravel surface, and took it down one of the old mud tracks. Shef seized the opportunity of relative quiet to speak again of the successes of the House of Wisdom.

“We're off to see a big thing,” he went on, leaning forward in his seat towards Alfred, “but there have been some small ones that have made as much of a difference. I didn't show you how this is hitched up at the front, for instance. But when we learned from Brand and his men how to harness a horse so it could pull, we found after a while that the horse-pull can be too strong. When you turn them, they often break their traces, as the pull comes through one side or the other, not through both. Well, we kept on using thicker leather. But then some farm-churl realized—I gave him his own farm and full livestock for it—that you don't need to harness the horses to the cart. You harness them to two ends of a stout bar instead, and you harness the bar, in the middle, to the cart. That way the pull evens out.

“And that doesn't just save on leather! No. I did not realize straight away. But often the real change a machine brings is not the first good it does, but the second. The whipple-tree, we call it, means men can plow shorter lines, smaller fields, because they can turn their teams more easily. And that means that even poor men, with no more than an acre or two, can plow their own fields instead of depending on their lords.”

“And they thank the king for it,” Alfred replied thoughtfully. “They become your men, not their landlords'. It is another thing, like your machine-fees, that makes you strong.”

Godive shifted in her seat. “That's why he did it. He does nothing without a reason. I learned that years ago.”

Shef fell silent, stared at his muddied fingers. After a few moments Alfred broke the silence. “This new thing you are taking us to see. Tell us about it.”

Shef replied in a flatter, duller tone. “Well. Round here, as you know, the land turns quickly to marsh. Some of it has always been marsh. Naturally, people try to drain it. But if you dig a channel you can't always tell which way the water will run, not down here, or if the water will even go into the channel.

“But we knew one thing.” Slowly the animation was coming back into his voice. “Anyone who brews a lot of beer knows that to get it out you can either tap the barrel low down—and then you have to plug it carefully or it'll all go—or else you can suck some up through a tube and then put the end of the tube in your jug or bucket. The beer keeps on running, even though you aren't sucking any more.”

“I never knew that. How?”

Shef shrugged. “No-one knows. Not yet. But once we knew that we knew what we needed. Big tubes, bigger than any man could get his mouth round. And something to suck the water through. Like a bellows in reverse. Then we could make the water run from a fen into a channel, even a channel some distance away.”

The wain and its escort pulled up by the mill they had been making for, and Shef jumped out, leaving the door swinging wide once more. Round the mill ran a confusion of muddy ditches, with here and there a tube of tarred canvas leading, seemingly, simply from one drain to another.

“Again, you see, new land.” Shef lowered his voice so only his royal guests could hear, not the escort. “I don't know how much. Sometimes I think there might be the worth of half a dozen shires lying waiting to be drained. And this land I do not give away. I make the mills, I pay the millers. What is gained remains royal land, to be leased out for the royal revenues.”

“To your own profit again,” cut in Godive, her voice like a whip. Alfred saw his scarred co-king flinch again. “Tell me, out of all this, what have you done for women?”

Shef hesitated, began to say something, checked himself. He was unsure what to name first. The mills themselves, which had released tens of thousands of female slaves from the everlasting chore of grinding grain with a hand-quern? The experiments being conducted in the Wisdom-House to find a better way to spin thread than the distaff, which almost every woman in the country still carried with her wherever she went, winding incessantly? No, Shef decided, the vital thing for women had been the soap-works he had set up, where they made a harsh and gritty soap out of ashes and animal fat: no new thing in itself, but one which, Hund the leech insisted, had halved the number of women dying of child-bed fever—once the king had issued an order that all midwives must take the soap and always wash their hands.

He took too long to decide. “I thought so,” said Godive and whirled away, dragging her children with her. “Everything is for men. And everything for money.”

She did not trouble to lower her voice. As she swept towards the wain, the two kings, Cwicca and Osmod, the miller and his wife, the two bands of royal escorts, all stared after her. Then all except Shef turned their eyes back to him.

He dropped his gaze. “It's not like that,” he muttered, the same anger growing inside him that he had felt when the man crashed from the tower and they had asked him to pay for failure nonetheless. “You can't do everything. You have to do what you know how to, first, and then see where that leads you. Women get their share of what we have done. More land, more food, more wool.”

“Aye,” agreed Cwicca. “A few years ago, every winter you saw little bairns in rags and barefoot every winter, crying for cold and hunger. Now they've coats at least, and hot food inside them. Because the king protects them.”

“That's right,” said Shef, looking up, his face suddenly fierce. “Because all this”—his arms waved at the mill, the fields, the drainage channels, the waiting wain—“all this depends on one thing. And that is force. A few years ago, if any king, if good King Edmund or King Ella had done any wise thing, as soon as he had enough silver to use, the Vikings would have been on him, to take it away and turn the land to beggary again. To keep it like this we have to sink ships and break armies!”

A growl of immediate assent from his men and Alfred's, all of whom had won their way by battle alone.

“Yes,” Shef went on, “all this is well enough. And I would be happy to see women take their part of it. But what I need most, what I would pay gold for, not silver, is not a new way of hitching horses, or of draining marshes, but a new way to defeat the Emperor out there. Bruno the German. For if we have forgotten him, here in the marsh, he has not forgotten us. Rig, my father”—Shef's voice rose to a shout, and he pulled from the breast of his tunic his silver ladder-emblem—“send me a new thing to bring victory in battle! A new sword, a new shield! New crossbows, new catapults. There is no other wisdom we need more. If Ragnarök is to come, let us fight it and win!”

Their king safely out of the way for a long morning, his closest advisers and friends had seized the opportunity to discuss him. They sat, the three of them, Brand, Thorvin and Hund, near the top of the great stone tower of the House of Wisdom, in Thorvin's private chamber, looking out over the busy and fertile countryside, the green fields divided by the long white strip of the Great North Road, riders and carts passing steadily along it. With them, though, and at Thorvin's insistence, sat a fourth man: Farman priest of Frey, one of the two great visionaries of the Way. An unimpressive figure, and one who had not shared the perils of the others, but deep in the secrets of the gods, or so Thorvin insisted.

Brand the giant Norwegian had looked askance at Farman for a while, but he had known the others, at least, long enough to speak frankly. “We've got to face it,” he began. “If he goes, Shef I mean, then everything will go. There's people like Guthmund, owes everything to the One King, stone-cold reliable as far as he's concerned. But would Guthmund agree to co-operate with Olaf, or Gamli, or Arnodd, or any of the other kings in Denmark or Norway? He would not. His own jarls wouldn't let him if he did. As for obeying an Englishman… No, this is a one-man business. The trouble is, the man's mad.”

“You've said that before,” said Hund the leech reprovingly, “and been proved wrong.”

“All right, all right,” Brand conceded. “Maybe he's not mad, just strange, he always has been. But you know what I mean all the same. He has won many battles and survived many strange events. But each one seems to take something out of him. And it isn't put back.”

The other three considered the matter: Hund the leech, priest of Ithun and Englishman, Thorvin the smith, priest of Thor and Dane, Farman the visionary, a man whose race was by now forgotten.

“He lost something when he killed Sigurth,” volunteered Hund. “He lost that lance. None of us knows how he came by it, exactly, but he valued it for some reason or another. They say it is the lance the new Emperor always carries with him, and Hagbarth says he saw the two fight, and Bruno run off with it. Maybe it is the good luck sign that the Christians call it, and that is what he has lost.”

Brand shook his head decisively. “No. We have experts on luck here, and he has not lost that. He is as lucky as he ever was. No, it is something else. Something to do with how he feels about himself.”

“He lost friends that day at the Braethraborg also,” Hund suggested again. “The young man from the Ditmarsh, and Cuthred the champion. Could he feel—guilty, maybe, because he lived and they did not?”

Brand, the veteran warrior, chewed on the thought, not much liking the taste of it. “I have known things like that,” he conceded eventually. “But I don't think that's it. To tell the truth”—he looked round before going on. “I think it's to do with that damned woman.”

“Godive, Alfred's wife?” said Hund, shocked. He had known them both since all three were small children.

“Yes, her. She talks to him as if he was a dog, and he flinches like one that has been beaten too often. But not just her. There was the other one too, Ragnhild, the queen in Norway. She took something from him. He did not kill her, but he caused her death, and her son's. If he feels guilty it is not about the men he has hurt, but about the women. That's why he will not take another one.”

A silence. This time it was Hund's turn to chew on a thought and not relish the taste of it.

“Talks to him like a dog,” he said in the end. “My name means ‘dog,’ as you know. My master, Shef's stepfather, thought that was all I would ever be to him. But he gave Shef a dog's name too, in hatred. We see new folk smile all the time when they hear us say ‘King Shef,’ as if we were saying ‘King Bowlegs’ or ‘King Fang.’ Norsemen cannot even pronounce it. You know Alfred has asked him several times to take another name, one that both English and Norse could say and honor: Offa or Atli, some hero-name from the past. Yet you say his is a hero-name, Thorvin? Perhaps it is time you explained that to us. For I feel whatever is happening here is the gods' business as well as ours. Tell us the whole story. And tell us why the Way has accepted him in the end, as the One who is to come. The three of us here, after all, know more of his story than anyone else in the world. And Farman is our guide to the gods. Maybe between the four of us we can judge it.”

Thorvin nodded, but hesitated a while, to organize his thoughts.

“It's like this,” he said in the end. “There is a very old story the Danes tell. It has never been turned into a poem, and it is not part of our holy books, or not one that all accept. I used to think little of it as well. But the more I reflect on it, the more it seems to me that it has a ring about it, a stink of old age. I believe it is a true story, and that it has meaning in the same way that the lays of Völund or of dead Balder do.

“One way that it is told is this. Many years ago—about the time that Christians say their Christ was born—the Danes found themselves without a king. They had driven out the last of their royal line, that Hermoth who is said to be the favorite warrior of Othin in Valhalla, for his cruelties. But without a king the cruelties grew even worse. It was an age when brother slew brother and no man's life was safe except when he had weapons in hand.

“Then one day, on the shore of the sea, they found a shield washed up, and in the shield there was a baby boy. His head was resting on a sheaf of barley, but other than that he had nothing. They took him in and reared him, and in time he became the mightiest king the North has ever known. He was so warlike that he made peace across the North. In his time, they say, a virgin could walk unescorted from one end of the North to the other, with gold on every finger and a bag of it at her girdle, and no man would stay her or offer her so much as a foul word. Danish kings still claim, some of them, to be of his line, the Skjöldungar, the Shieldings, for he was called Skjöld after the shield they found him in.

“That is one story,” Thorvin went on, “and you can see it makes a kind of sense. The shield gives the name, the Shieldings. And because the boy came from nowhere men say that the gods sent him, because they saw the misery of the Danes and pitied it.

“But in other ways it does not make much sense, and that is why I think it is genuine. Yes, Brand, I see you raise your eyebrows, but what I am telling you is that the good sense of the gods is not the same as the good sense of men. Consider: the gods pitied the misery of the Danes? Since when do our gods pity anything? We would not worship them if they did. And anyway, what about this sheaf? It is always in the story, but no one knows why. I think that is the key to understanding.

“I think that the story as we have it has been told wrong, over the years. I think the name of the king was once heard as Skjöld Skjefing, or in English Scyld Sceafing. Some storyteller somewhere took the name and made a story out of it. He said the king was called ‘Shield’ because—why, because he had floated to land on a shield. And he was called ‘Sheafing’ because—because there must have been a sheaf with him. The names came from the things. Even the story about floating to land came from the idea of the hollow shield. Now, I do not think any of that was true.

“Instead I think there was a real king called ‘Shield.’ Many of us have names like that. Your name, Brand, means ‘sword.’ I have met men called Geirr, ‘spear,’ or Franki, ‘battle-axe.’ There was a king called Shield. He was called Sheafing not because of having his head on a sheaf, but because he was the son of Sheaf. Or Shef.”

Thorvin seemed to think he had finished his explanation.

After a while Hund prompted him further. “But what does this story, this old story, mean?”

Thorvin fingered his hammer pendant. “In my view—and this is not shared by others of the College, indeed some would call me a heretic if they heard me say it, Farman, as well you know. In my view it means three things. One, these kings were remembered, or invented, for a reason. I think the reason is that they set our world on a track, a track it had not gone before. I think the war-king who made peace, Shield, he was the one who organized men into nations and gave the North law: law better than the strife of brother against brother that they had had before. I think the peace-king, Sheaf, gave us barley and crops and fields, and turned us from the ways of our ancestors, who lived like the Finns, hunting in the waste. Or like your cousins the Huldu-folk, Brand. Meat-eaters and wanderers.

“Two, I think the track they set us on was the right track, and men have never quite forgotten it. But since then we have climbed back onto the wrong track: the track of Hermoth, Othin's favorite. War and piracy. We give it proud names and call it drengskapr, the hermanna vegr, gallantry, the warriors' way. You do that, Brand, I know. But it comes down to the strong robbing the weak.”

“I prefer to rob the strong,” growled Brand, but Thorvin ignored him.

“I think King Shef has been sent here to return us to the right track. But that track is not the track of Hermoth, or of Othin. Indeed I think our king bears Othin's enmity. He will not sacrifice to him. He will not take his token.

“And now I come to what some would call heresy. I cannot help remembering that all this was supposed to happen at the same time as the Christians say their White Christ came. And why did he come? Why did Sheaf and Shield come? I can only say this, and it is the third opinion I hold.

“I think the world at some time endured some great maim, some great wound that could not be cured. Balder died, we say, and the light went out of the world. The Christians have their foolish story of an apple and a serpent, but it comes to the same point: the world was maimed, and it needed a healer.

A healer from outside. The Christians say the healer was the Christ and the healing is done, and so we can all sit on our backsides and wait for rescue. Hah! We say maybe—or we used to say—that two kings came, to start us on our way. Then we lost it. It is my view that the king we have, not called Shef by chance, has come to set us on the right way again, like his many times grandsire. For I think that both he and his ancient namesake are the begetting of a god, the god Rig. Not older, maybe, than Othin, but wiser.“

After a pause Hund said, fingering his Ithun-pendant, “I cannot see where the heresy lies in that, Thorvin. Not that we are Christians in any case to tell men what to think.”

Thorvin stared into the distance, out across road and fields. “I am beginning to suggest that the Way-stories and the Christ-story are of the same kind. Both false, both garbled. Or, it may be, both true. But true fragments of a greater whole.”

Brand laughed, suddenly. “And you may be right, Thorvin! But while you may persuade me, and Hund here, and even the council of the priests of the Way if you talk to them long enough, I doubt you will get far in persuading the Pope of the Christians in Rome to go along with you. And agree that maybe the Way has some truth on its side too!”

Thorvin laughed with him. “No, I shall not go to Rome and ask for an audience to put my point of view. Nor will I forget that whatever one thinks of the Christians, the Church remains our deadly enemy. And the Empire now that supports it. They say our king had Bruno the German in the sights of his crossbow that day. He should have pulled trigger.”

For the first time Farman spoke, the pale thin face unaffected by emotion. “The maim,” he repeated. “The maim the world has suffered, that this second Shef, or second Savior, has been sent to heal. In our myth that is the death of Balder, brought about by the tricks of Loki. But we all know that Othin tried to have Balder released from Hel, and failed, and chained Loki beneath serpent-fangs in vengeance. Vengeance may be good, but how can one see any cure?”

“If there is a cure,” said Thorvin, “it will come about through something mere sense cannot predict. But our friend Shef—he is wise, but often good sense is not in him.”

“And so we are back to our real question,” Hund concluded. “Whether he is man or half-god, crazy or driven, what are we to do with him?”

Farman looked out at the shape of a speeding coach on the road, trailed by a plume of dust and thirty galloping horses. “I cannot be sure,” he said. “I have seen nothing in my dreams of this. But from all I have heard, I would say that this man has unfinished business with the gods. Maybe it is his destiny to regain the Holy Lance, maybe to burn the gates of Rome, I do not know. But while he sits here he is rejecting it, turning his gaze away.”

“Fretting about women he left behind many years ago,” agreed Brand.

“It may be he needed the chance to draw breath, even to grow to be a man,” Farman went on. “But he will grow no more if he stays here playing muddy games with yokels.”

“We must get him on board a ship,” said Thorvin. “Maybe it will take him where the gods mean him to be, like the naked child floating on the shield in the story.”

“But this time he must not go alone,” said Farman. “You are his friends. You must go with him. As for me—I will wait for clearer guidance.”

From outside the notes of the bagpipe squealed their discordant warning.